by J D Lasica
Second, take advantage of Birthrights’ relationship with the world’s biggest consumer data mining operations. Billionaire investor Randolph Blackburn had earned the bulk of his fortune as the world’s most notorious data broker, hoovering up millions of individuals’ online profiles, their spending habits, ethnicity, sexual orientation, illnesses. All quite legal. Harrison’s bioinformatics geeks took those big data sets and predicted other characteristics and behaviors .
Third, add Birthrights’ secret sauce to the mix. Two main ingredients in the secret sauce: hackers and trackers.
Lance Harrison—who had Level One clearance—knew about both confidential programs, and he was skilled at keeping his data geeks from asking too many questions. Most of his staffers assumed the data came from behind doors number one or two without even realizing there was a door number three, information gleaned from black-hat hackers in Moldova and Conrad’s team of personal trackers—an inspiring innovation that Blackburn had pioneered years ago by putting two adoptive parents on his payroll.
The data geeks came to call their internal server farm the Biohack Global Database. The Bioinformatics data crunchers fancied themselves as biohackers who were cracking the code of creation. By sorting through millions of sequenced genomes and mapping recurring patterns to find commonalities and anomalies, they were the trailblazers of the Genetics Age.
Which genes made you red-headed or left-handed or nearsighted? Which DNA sequences gave you dimples or wavy brown hair or the curve of your smile? That was the cornerstone of the new genetics. Hell, it was the holy grail.
“I just finished the revisions to the client surveys,” Harrison said, snapping Waterhouse out of his fog.
“Good, good. Send them over and I’ll review.” They had scooped up a wealth of behavioral insights from the prospects who attended last weekend’s Island Retreat.
“Number Six,” Harrison spoke into the ether, as if addressing an invisible force, “send the survey revisions I just completed to Sterling Waterhouse.”
“Survey revisions sent,” a female computer voice replied. All the major offices on the campus were built with a subtle array of audio and video ports positioned along the ceilings and walls that let executives communicate with Number Six.
The geeks in the Data Zone had considered homages to “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” when assigning a name to the voice of Birthrights Unlimited’s brand new Artificial Intelligence. Most of the company’s execs didn’t know what to make of it, but the data geeks were all over it. They named her Number Six after the sexy blond Cylon chick on the classic TV series “Battlestar Galactica.”
Waterhouse was less interested in new tech playthings than in making lots of money. As it turned out, the Island Retreat had a big payoff not just in new clients but in key marketing insights. Up until now, it was all jabber and conjecture. For years, Birthrights Unlimited had hosted focus groups, coffee klatches, pizza nights, and online chats, all asking couples and prospective parents endless questions.
Would you increase your child’s IQ by 10 points if you could? Twenty points? Forty?
Would you pay an extra $5,000 to reduce your child’s chance of getting diabetes, cancer, or heart disease?
Would you want to make your child a better sprinter? A better endurance athlete?
Would you want to increase your daughter’s breast size to a C or D cup size if you could?
Would you want to enhance the size of your son’s manhood?
On and on, an endless game of Design Your Ideal Child.
But now the rubber was finally hitting the road. Real parents-to-be ponying up real dollars and making real choices about what they wanted to see in their soon-to-be-real progeny. In the end it came down to whether it was safe, which traits they wanted to include, and how much it cost.
Unfortunately, some of the more popular asks—higher intelligence, longer lifespans, even male endowment—were nowhere near the ready-for-market stage, forcing clients to be content with options for optimizing health and appearance for the most part.
“Speaking of the Island Retreat, I still don’t feel good about the shortcut we took in the Valerie Ramirez case,” Harrison said, refilling his cup at the coffee machine. “Man, you should have seen her jet out of that room. It was like she saw a ghost.”
“We should be hearing from Ms. Ramirez any day. As we discussed, her situation is an outlier. She already knew what her son looked like at age three.”
It was true they had duped her, but Waterhouse didn’t regret this at all. For the other clients at the retreat, the Virtual Profile Simulator that Harrison’s team had deployed was the real deal, creating a crude approximation of how a child might look, extrapolating from the DNA of an early embryo. The hologram experience delivered a powerful, visceral punch, so much so that most of the attendees decided on the spot to move forward with a surrogacy.
Fortunately, in a few years no one would clearly remember what they saw in those two minutes with their Eyewear. No refunds for a three-year-old toddler whose looks didn’t develop just so. There were no guarantees in biohacking.
Valerie Ramirez’s case was different. For the hologram of young Jordan that she saw, Harrison’s team altered the algorithm to factor in not just probabilities of how the child might turn out after sequencing skin cells collected from the toddler’s toys and blankie. Why bother with DNA when you could hack into her home computer and snag two dozen photos of baby Jordan? The resulting hologram was not a lie but a more accurate result than the algorithm could glean from DNA alone.
Make no mistake. The second coming of Jordan would be the spitting image of the original.
Waterhouse checked his timepiece. He had a meeting across campus in ten minutes.
“Are you almost done with the case studies for the biz dev team?” he asked.
“I don’t need to know how the data will be used,” Harrison said. “But in a perfect world, the results would be anonymized.”
“That’s true. In a perfect world. ”
Waterhouse had been personally overseeing a new business development initiative that could open up a lucrative new revenue stream. While federal law prohibited discrimination on the basis of genetic information when it came to health insurance and employment, there was no such prohibition when it came to life insurance.
Why not work with life insurance carriers to identify walking health hazards based on their DNA profiles? Why not work with large corporations so they can take out “dead peasants” life insurance, as it’s called, on high-risk employees? When an employer takes out a policy, the employee doesn’t need to know about it. Many of the 2.7 million people in the Biohack database were employed in the corporate world, and Birthrights had collected significant info about their genetic makeups. Why not sell that info to corporate America so they could hedge against the genetic time bombs on their payrolls?
“Anything else we need to knock off today, Chief?”
“Lemme check.” Waterhouse scrolled through the action items on his smartphone. A lot on his plate right now. Follow-up calls to the high rollers who attended the Island Retreat. The fertility center in China missing its quotas. The upcoming meetings with the Justice and Defense Departments. And he had to fly to L.A. tomorrow to meet Randolph Blackburn about the DNA Legends and grave teams, followed by a speech he was giving at UCLA the next day. Too much to keep on top of—he would have to widen his circle of trusted advisors.
But one matter loomed over everything else—the storm gathering on the horizon. Petrov was making noises about the deliverables he was due, only six days from now.
“Harrison, is there anything we can do to speed up our turnaround time on the monthly numbers we’re hitting in the Fertility Clinic?”
Harrison nearly dropped his coffee mug. “Chief. It takes nine months from conception to delivery. That’s not a variable you can mess with.”
He suspected as much. Speeding up metabolism during gestation was a non-starter. And hadn’t he learned
his lesson in the Lab from years ago?
“All right then.”
He whisked out of the Data Center, but his mind was already weighing other options. Using Conrad’s black market connections to find some newborns. Renegotiating Petrov’s shares. Kidnapping was probably out. But he would have to come up with something fast. The alternative was unthinkable.
He paced through Birthrights Plaza and was about to speed-dial Alan Tornquist when he spotted his chief counsel up ahead. “Tornquist!” he shouted and flicked his fingers to summon him.
Tornquist hurried over, out of breath even though he had half-jogged only twenty yards.
“Did you find the original funding agreement?”
“The one that you and Petrov signed way back when? Yes.”
Waterhouse nodded, quickening his pace to see if Tornquist could keep up.
“And?”
“Not good news. I don’t see any grounds for invalidating it.”
He figured as much. The company’s original counsel was careful to craft the language so there would be an immediate infusion of $44 million into Birthrights’ coffers. In exchange, Waterhouse gave up an acceptable amount of equity in the company—but no board seats—on top of performance guarantees and those generous balloon payouts.
“When do the balloon provisions come due?”
Tornquist whipped out his smartphone and checked the date. “August thirty-first. In nineteen days.”
Waterhouse stopped in his tracks and stared at Tornquist in disbelief .
Nineteen days? How was that possible? Had eight and a half years really flown by that fast?
“Are we on track to hit our numbers?”
“I checked with Conrad and Jiang,” Tornquist said. “The short answer is no, not by a long shot. Somehow this fell through the cracks. We’re already five baby girls behind … in arrears ... overdue … I don’t even know if there’s a name for this.”
Christ, and double Christ. Yes, there’s a name for this. A royal clusterfuck! And you do not want, in any way, to fuck with Dmitri Petrov.
8
New York, August 12
A fter a day of thinking about it, Kaden decided her first step would be to locate Contact and find out if he knew anything about what the hell was going on. She didn’t know Contact’s name but knew where he worked—after their first meeting, she got a little paranoid and tailed him across town.
Rush hour was a mess, so she decided the fastest way to get to midtown Manhattan was on her souped-up electric bike that she and Nico had hacked. While most e-bikes stopped providing electric assistance as soon as your pedaling reached twenty mph, she and Nico rewired it to do just the opposite: When she hit fifteen mph, pedal power was replaced by the electric motor with a top speed of fifty.
Yep, not exactly legal. Bust me!
She took the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan, then south on Water Street, across Wall Street, and down New Street. Along the way, in her head she retraced everything she’d done since she left the Baker household four years ago when she was about to turn eighteen.
She’d decided not to go to college and chose instead to enroll at a special ops school after a certified letter arrived in the mail. It offered her a full scholarship to attend an exclusive boot camp—the only one of its kind—if she agreed to become the first female enrollee. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a surefire ticket out of the Baker gulag.
The letter promised a “grueling body teardown” and “ten months of pure hell” in the backwoods outside of Hueytown, Alabama, where operatives were instructed in the finer points of special ops. Some trainees used the boot camp to prepare for Army Special Forces tryouts, but you could take the training and use it for anything you wanted.
One line in the letter jumped out at her: Turn your body into a weapon.
She decided at that moment to enroll. After her sexual assault during a solo hike the year before, she vowed to make sure that never happened again.
Boot camp was life-changing in ways an outsider could never understand. It was where she became an adult. It was where she met Nico. Looking back at it, she wondered if the no-tuition scholarship they awarded her was just good fortune or the work of some unseen forces.
Okay, mark down those ten months as a big, fat question mark .
After her shitstorm of a childhood and that special ops camp, she took off for almost a year to find herself. She traveled, learned kickboxing, and dabbled in extreme sports—free-diving, free climbing, skydiving, kitesurfing. After a day of nature sports, she usually spent her nights honing her hacking skills. On her twentieth birthday, broke and looking for work, she landed a job at an international private security firm, where she joined a team providing protection to corporate CEOs traveling abroad on the strength of her sharpshooting and special ops skills .
Okay, the private security gig. A plum job, and another question mark.
Around the time her security contract ended, Nico moved to New York, found a job at B Collective, and persuaded her to join him there. They wound up scoring several well-paying data analytics projects. But while data analytics paid the bills, her special ops skills were moldering, so she accepted a handful of high-paying, high-stakes freelance assignments that showed up on her smartphone. Contact was her point person for all those gigs.
She was still rewinding her recent past when she realized she’d arrived.
The Astoria Club, just a block from the New York Stock Exchange, sported an austere, curved façade, sloped at the top, where you couldn’t miss the phallic symbol imagery. Contact worked at one of the front offices just off the reception area of the upscale spa and retreat for Wall Street high rollers.
Kaden locked her e-bike at a bike rack and barreled up four flights of stairs. A woman who looked about her own age sat behind a welcome desk lit up with fancy pendant lighting. She pretended to get into a squabble with the receptionist about losing a spa reservation she’d made.
That’s when she spotted him, with his spiffy Ivy League haircut, talking on his mobile phone right across the lobby. He saw her and his expression shifted from recognition to alarm. She closed the gap between them, sprinting across the gold-colored carpet, and caught the door just as he tried to duck back inside his office.
She slipped inside, shut the door behind her, grabbed him by the lapels, and pinned him against the wall. They were about the same size, but Kaden knew how to work a subject.
“All right, I need some answers!”
“Hey, calm down.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
Contact looked a little freaked, so she loosened her grip .
He hesitated, no doubt weighing the merits of an immediate beat-down versus what would happen if he told her what he knew. She decided to reach inside his jacket and grab his smartphone—phones don’t lie. Still active. She began scrolling through screens full of contacts, emails, photos, recent calls. Two calls from the same number came in earlier this morning before their scheduled meeting in McCarren Park. She memorized the number.
She scrolled down and saw the calls on the day when they’d met up before the St. Peter’s job. Again, the same number had called Contact’s phone right before their meeting. She took a photo of Contact’s screen with her smartphone.
Contact watched her with a bemused intensity. “You don’t want to go there.”
Does he mean that literally or not? Doesn’t matter. She went on inspecting his phone for any last clues.
He straightened himself and checked his jacket to see if she’d torn it. “I told your parents not to contact you, but they insisted.”
“You mean my adoptive parents. My for-hire adoptive parents.”
“I can look into a severance package for you—”
“I don’t want money!” Kaden slammed his phone down onto the desk. “I came here for answers! Who was behind our missions? Who was my mother? What was her name? What happened to her? What’s my real name?”
With
each question, Contact looked more puzzled. “Look, I handle operational details, that’s all. I don’t know anything about the benefactor or about your mother.”
She searched his face. He honestly looks like he’s not holding anything back.
Contact picked up his phone, inspected it to make sure she hadn’t broken the damn thing, and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “You won’t find the answers you want. I don’t know who this guy is, why you were chosen for the missions, or what’s changed, if anything.”
Contact did this for a paycheck. Maybe he doesn’t know who was behind this . But every action leaves a trace. And now it’s my move.
She gave Contact one last severe look, then turned and winged it out of his office. She slowed her pace and floated down the stairwell, her surroundings no longer registering.
It was as if her entire existence had just been ground up and tossed about in a cosmic blender. Her real mother was a mystery, and she wasn’t sure what would come loose when she pulled that string. She had no idea how much of her upbringing was real or authentic. The identity she cultivated and wore like a tattoo—world-weary and damaged and slow to trust, sure, but never a victim and always in control—was now very much in doubt.
In short, her past was a cipher, a cruel, taunting question mark. She didn’t know how or why, but she was pretty sure this “benefactor” had used and manipulated her.
She vowed right then. She would find this “benefactor.”
9
Miami, August 14
V alerie Ramirez rolled over in bed, buoyant and naked in her small downtown Miami condo, confident and proud of her still-fit body in the suffused morning light.
“One more time?” she asked.
“You’re insatiable!” Her boyfriend, Alex Wyatt—tall, slim, athletic, with a world-class butt, and ten years her junior—leaned over and kissed her. He removed his used condom, wrapped it in a tissue, and tossed it in a wastepaper basket. “Next time we go three rounds, I promise. But I have to get back to work.” Back to his job as a senior correspondent at the online news site Axom.